How do you know you’re not going deeper into the dungeon?
She didn’t. Nor could she be sure she wasn’t following a wight—it would explain how the child could see in the darkness. For that matter, there might be nobody there; maybe she was following an evil spell leading her to her death. But what choice did she have? Wait in the dungeon for her fate?
Moments later, Nathaliey stumbled into a stone staircase that curved up from the dungeon. She took the stairs, following the footsteps ahead of her, and as the stairs rounded the corner, the first glimpse of light reached her eyes. She spotted her rescuer. Very small, a tiny shadow moving ahead of her in the gray. The child couldn’t be older than three or four, and so small that he needed to climb the stairs on all fours.
Finally, an ajar door that opened to a lit room. The child pushed it open and stepped out, and Nathaliey followed, eyes blinking as they adjusted to the light.
“Where—” she began.
Then, in spite of her pain, her bound hands, and her residual anger at the wretched way she’d been assaulted in the khalif’s presence, she began to laugh.
Her rescuer was Omar’s monkey. Trained to fetch bowls of dates and raisins, flagons of wine, and other items at the whim of the khalif, this time it had carried a heavy iron jailer’s key, which it still clenched in its teeth.
At her laughter, the monkey looked up at her with its wizened face, a question in its eyes.
“I don’t suppose Omar sent you, did he?” she asked. “No, I thought not. A monkey is braver than our fearless leader. I suppose that leaves only one person who could manage this, unless the master has come back to life, all evidence to the contrary. Take me to him, will you? Wait. Are you clever enough to untie my hands?” She showed them to the monkey, but it only bared its teeth around the iron key. “Very well, lead on.”
The monkey seemed to understand this much, at least, and turned to go. They’d emerged into a narrow hallway with a short ceiling of ribbed arches, and she had to duck to get through them. The light, which had seemed so bright at first, was only the late afternoon sun filtering in through small windows spaced every third arch. Dust motes danced in the beams.
The hallway opened into a full room, and here Nathaliey spotted two guards standing watch, facing away from her with polearms in hand. Nathaliey shrank against the wall with a silent curse. The guards wore the red and black of Veyre. Had the whole bloody palace been overrun by Pasha Malik’s men?
The monkey kept walking forward, and was about to reach the guards, the jailer’s key still clenched in its teeth.
Get back here, you silly thing. You’ll get yourself killed.
Which would be followed almost immediately by Nathaliey’s own death. The moment they finished spearing the poor thing, they’d look down the corridor from which it had come and spot her. She desperately tried to get her hands free from behind her back.
The monkey strolled between the two guards and seemed to fade. Even staring right at it, all Nathaliey saw was a blurred shadow gliding across the floor, and then it was gone. The guards paid it no attention.
More wizardry at work. This particular incantation had better hold for her, too. She clenched her teeth and walked forward as silently as possible.
The guards had the relaxed posture of men placed on watch far from danger. The older man on the right spat a wad of khat to the floor. He took fresh leaves from a small pouch at his waist and stuffed them into his cheek.
“Filthy habit,” he said cheerfully, “but it cuts the hunger between meals.”
“I figured you was just bored,” the younger man said.
“That, too. When you’ve crossed the desert as many times as I have, you need something to take care of boredom and hunger. The khat don’t help much when you get cut up by camel riders, though. You need poppy milk for that.”
Nathaliey passed between the two men, but neither looked at her. She spotted the monkey now, across the larger room, where it waited in the shadow of one of the fluted red-and-white pillars holding up the ceiling.
“I’d rather not find out,” the younger one said. “Hoping to get sent to the mountains.”
His companion chuckled and spoke around the wad of khat. “You think that’s safer? The Dark Gatherer will fill his bag with souls before the year is out, mark my words.”
“If I’m going to die either way, may as well be where it’s nice and cool and it still rains.”
Nathaliey wanted to stop and listen, see if they would spill any secrets as to what the Veyrians intended for Aristonia, but as soon as she reached the pillar, the monkey continued. It was still little more than a shadow in the bright light, and she had to follow or lose it.
A wide doorway on the far side opened into a larger corridor, and for the first time since leaving the dungeon, Nathaliey was able to place her position in the palace. Off to the left lay the khalif’s apartments. Straight ahead would bring her to the staircase leading to the libraries, and below that, the Vault of Secrets. But the monkey didn’t go in either of those directions. Instead, it took an open doorway to the right that led to a small patio. She stepped onto it and out of view of the guards, then quietly closed the door behind her.
The patio overlooked the palace as it descended the rocky hilltop in a series of terraces, courtyards, and hanging gardens. Below the palace, the city of Syrmarria clung to the hillside in a dense warren of whitewashed buildings and narrow, winding streets, the steepest being little more than staircases impassable to carts. Beyond the city walls lay the ancient ziggurats and obelisks of the Tombs of the Kings, bisected by the River Nye as it entered the fertile plain of Aristonia to the west.
From Palace Hill, one could see all the way to the distant peaks of the Dragon’s Spine if the weather were clear, but the air today was thick with dust from the sandstorms blowing off the drought-cursed khalifates to the east. The dust combined with the cook fires of the city to send the setting sun down in a ball of blazing red glory as it dipped toward the horizon.
Closer at hand, within the palace itself, servants hurried along the paths between buildings, while palace guards strolled on their evening rounds. Viziers and lesser ministers sat with their wives at stone tables, drinking tea and watching the setting sun. There were more than a few Veyrian soldiers about, as well. Nobody had yet looked up and spotted her on the narrow balcony, but she was well exposed where she stood. Where had that monkey gone?
“Press your back to the wall,” came a familiar voice that seemed to come from nowhere. “You are standing outside the range of my spell, and someone will see you.”
Nathaliey stepped back against the wall, and there she found Chantmer and Narud, hidden within the same magic cone that had concealed her escape. The taller apprentice looked pale and drawn, and the cloth at his waist was damp with blood. Narud looked stronger, but that was probably due to more time passing since he’d cast his own spell. The khalif’s monkey sat on his shoulder, eating slices of an orange that Narud fed it.
Chantmer untied the cords binding her wrists, and she groaned as her arms came loose and she brought them in front of her.
“Better?” he asked.
“You have no idea. Thank you. How did you get here so quickly?”
“We were already on the road when your trouble began,” Narud said. “Markal sent us.”
He set down the animal, which scrambled over the railing and grabbed hold of a vine-covered trellis. It climbed down halfway, leaped into a nearby fig tree, and disappeared.
“How did Markal know I was in trouble enough to send you in advance?”
“No, your friend didn’t send us,” Chantmer corrected. “And he could not have known.”
Nathaliey didn’t miss the emphasis on “friend,” as if her closeness to Markal were somehow a defect. And why shouldn’t she be close to Markal? She’d been stripped of her old identity when she joined the order. Eventually, everyone she knew and loved would fade like the dying leaves of autumn while she carried on, v
irtually unchanged. But that didn’t erase the longing one had for close companionship.
So who would it be? Memnet the Great was a mentor and a wise teacher, but not a friend. The acolytes, keepers, and archivists were beneath her in power and ambition. That left the other three apprentices—her peers and companions. Chantmer was obsessed with his studies, his pride in his growing power, and his struggle for what he saw as his rightful place in the Order. Narud was absorbed with the natural world, with mushrooms and mice. He could spend days or even weeks in as mundane a task as studying honeybees. He claimed that the tiny creatures spoke to each other in a sort of dance, and had estimated how many thousands of hours bees needed to work to provide a single spoonful of honey.
Only Markal had the humanity, the humor, and the sensitivity to provide the companionship her heart craved. It wasn’t merely friendship, nor even the bond of family, and it certainly wasn’t anything so foolish and transitory as romantic love that she felt for him, but a deeper connection.
“Anyway,” Chantmer continued, “the master has not returned. He may never do so—we must be prepared for that eventuality. And we have other troubles.”
Chantmer shared the alarming news of an attack on the gardens. A barbarian warrior had penetrated their sanctuary, broken through their protective wards, damaged the Golden Pavilion, and cut down Eliana, one of the keepers. Chantmer and Narud had slipped away and left Markal to deal with the woman.
“A barbarian?” she pressed. “Are you sure? Does she have gray skin?”
“She does not,” Chantmer said. “She is pale and pink as a babe, and her hair is the color of wheat. Sky-blue eyes. Calls herself a paladin, a holy warrior of some kind.”
“She is a killer,” Narud said. “She murdered Eliana, and will kill again.”
“It goes beyond slaying old women,” Chantmer said. “This barbarian can handle a sword like no one I’ve ever seen. And there’s magic about her, too.”
“But no gray skin.” This wasn’t a question. Rather, Nathaliey was confused.
The hunch that she had been following in the Vault of Secrets, that some order of knights had delved into necromancy so they could destroy the master, dissolved. This woman was something else entirely. And yet there were the missing pages from the Book of Gods. What of that?
Nathaliey shared what she’d discovered in turn, and then the two men wanted to hear how she’d been taken prisoner, what had happened with the khalif, and whether she knew who had cut the book.
“I don’t. An enemy of ours, that is for sure. I think those pages revealed the secret of the assassins and their magic.” She shook her head. “Someone doesn’t want us to know.”
“It would seem that the Vault of Secrets is no longer hidden,” Narud said.
“It never was, not truly,” Nathaliey said. “The khalif and his ministers may not be able to find it, but they know it is there. They know we spend long hours in the vault, that it is the source of our knowledge.”
“We have more immediate concerns,” Chantmer said. He’d regained much of his color in the few minutes they’d been talking, and now stood with an open, confident posture. “Obviously, the assassin who killed our master was sent by the khalif.”
“Impossible,” Nathaliey said. “Omar is incapable of such a thing.”
“He is complicit, at the very least.”
She studied Chantmer’s face. He seemed to know something. “What do you mean?”
“I would assume that the killers themselves were Veyrians. The high king sent them—he will have his highway, and the master was the only one stopping him. As for the khalif, Omar knew of your mission to Marrabat and must have told the king how to find you on the Spice Road.”
“We have met the high king,” Nathaliey protested. “He is no murderer, either.”
“The king was a friend and ally of the master,” Narud said. “A wizard himself, at one time. Why would he do such a thing? For his highway? I don’t think so.”
Chantmer shrugged at these objections. “He had magic once. Now he hates and fears it.”
“Hates and fears it, yet sends assassins wielding magic?” she asked.
“Very well, then he hates and fears the magic of his former order. He was forced to renounce it, and would see it wiped from the land.”
“You have no evidence of that,” Nathaliey said. “The high king met with the master only six months ago to seek his wisdom about the griffins in the mountains and the barbarian kingdoms on the other side.”
“They argued about the road, if you’ll recall,” Chantmer said.
“There was no heat in it,” she insisted. “The king conceded in the end.”
“As you wish. I withdraw the suggestion. But even so, the high king may well profit by the master’s death.”
“He might, but it’s too soon to make his move. It’s only been three weeks since the master died. The king can’t have acted so quickly, not even if a swift horse had galloped to Veyre with the news, and an equally swift horse galloped back. There’s been no time to order the pasha and the khalif to move against us.”
“Very well.” Chantmer waved his hand, but there was no real concession in his gesture. “Then his generals have taken initiative. This Pasha Malik, eager to please his king and frustrated with the pace of construction, set about the task himself. The entire business is his idea. He hired the assassins and bid them kill our master. And what is the result? The road will cut through Aristonia and gash open the Sacred Forest.”
Chantmer’s refined theory had more merit, she conceded. Yet it still didn’t answer how the pages had been cut from the book in the library, nor why the barbarian had come.
Narud had been staring toward the setting sun, a sliver on the horizon and fading quickly. Now he spoke up. “It is almost time. We can reach the gardens by morning if we leave at once.”
“Morning?” she asked doubtfully. “Do you have horses?”
“We don’t need horses,” Narud said.
“Safer on foot,” Chantmer said. “Easier to hide.”
“I suppose so.”
Nathaliey was reluctant to leave Syrmarria without putting things right in the khalif’s palace—expelling the pasha and his soldiers and having hard words with Omar and the viziers, as well as finding the pages stolen from the Book of Gods. But more selfishly, she blanched at the thought of putting her sore, battered body onto the road.
Narud had an uncanny way of sensing fear and pain in animals, and he must have exercised the same ability with her, because he took her injured shoulder and massaged it as if she were an injured dog or mule. A few words came to his lips, and the pain eased. As her most serious injury faded, she suddenly felt the bruises in her face, the painful marks on her wrists, and the ache in her ribs where they’d kicked her. Narud touched each of the injuries in turn.
“There is work to be done here,” she pressed, even as she submitted to Narud’s healing touch. “Are you certain I have to leave? Couldn’t you go on without me?”
“We need you,” Chantmer told her. He sounded pained at the admission. “Markal wants you, and even if we were to leave you behind, this business of getting you out of the dungeon has left us drained. We need your magic to see us safely out of the city.”
“But there’s scheming in Syrmarria, and I hate to leave it festering. I can’t let Pasha Malik ensconce himself in the city.”
“Actually, the pasha rode out with a small force earlier this afternoon,” Chantmer said. “Whatever he meant to accomplish in Syrmarria, he’s done it.”
“His army, then. Look below you—there are Veyrians inside the palace.” Nathaliey turned to Narud. “Do you agree? Should I leave the city?”
Narud held her gaze. “If the garden falls to this barbarian, nothing that happens in Syrmarria will matter.”
#
They escaped the palace easily enough. Nathaliey knew side corridors and semi-concealed passageways that led to the gates, and a simple spell baffled the inattent
ive fools at the guard towers. It helped that nobody seemed to have noticed her absence from the dungeons, and so the palace was not yet on alert.
Once in the narrow cobbled streets of Syrmarria, however, Narud stopped and sniffed at the air. “Someone is searching for us.”
“How do you know?” she asked in a low voice.
“Strange magic. Don’t you smell it?”
Nathaliey and Chantmer exchanged frowns. She shook her head, and Chantmer shrugged.
“It’s there,” Narud insisted. “Be careful.”
What did Narud think they were doing, strolling down the alley banging a gong? Anyway, she wasn’t convinced. Narud didn’t often come to the city, and perhaps he was confused by the accumulation of minor spells to be found in any great concentration of people: merchants and moneylenders using charms to cheat each other, the devout with talismans blessed in the name of one of the Brother Gods, even midwives using their simple magic to ease childbirth and aid the flow of milk in a new mother.
Belying Narud’s fears, they passed unchallenged through the snaking alleyways of the souks, which were emptying of merchants and goods as night fell, even as the smell of cardamom and incense hung heavy in the air, mixed with the rich scent of baking bread from communal ovens. Soon the apprentices reached the city gates, which remained open at night, barring a threat from nomads riding up from the southern deserts, and they joined the outgoing carts and foot traffic on the road.
And then, as the stones gave way to a rutted dirt track cutting into the Aristonian countryside, Nathaliey sensed it. Just a whiff, barely detectable above the background magic that was ever-present through this small khalifate. The smell was . . . wrong, that’s how she would describe it. Almost rotten. It was like walking into a kitchen and smelling a rat that had crawled into a dark corner and died.
“An enemy,” Chantmer said. “Yes, I sense it now.”
Narud nodded. “Now you know. You understand.”
“If we’ve smelled them,” Nathaliey said, “then they’ve smelled us, in turn.”
She rolled up her sleeves. There was a little tightness in her shoulder and a dull ache in her side, but otherwise she felt strong, almost heady with her own strength, and ready to test it against whomever or whatever was pitting itself against them.
The Red Sword (The Red Sword Trilogy Book 1) Page 7